- Nov 23, 2020
- 5,930
- 1,706
How many backlinks should a website have?
More precisely, how many backlinks are needed for each page to rank high in the Google search engine.
To be competitive in the SERPs, a website should have 40 to 50 backlinks to the main page and 0 to 100 backlinks to each individual web page. However, what matters is the PageRank of these backlinks, because the higher the PageRank, the fewer links are needed to increase the overall ranking.
Your goal for long-term keyword competitiveness and higher rankings should be to get as many backlinks with the highest PageRank as possible. Therefore, it is better to get one link with a high PR9 than ten links with PR1.
Factors that influence the number of backlinks your website needs
DA, DR, and AS
DA is an SEO metric that measures the overall strength of a domain. DR is Ahrefs' version of DA that shows the strength of a website's backlink profile. And Authority Score (AS) is an adaptation of DA from Semrush to measure the overall quality and effectiveness of SEO for a website.
DA, DR, and AS are scored on a 100-point scale, where higher scores indicate a stronger domain with a higher likelihood of achieving better results in search results.
The reason why this usually happens is that Google's algorithm takes into account off-page SEO factors, such as backlinks, to determine where a website should be in the index. A website that is linked to by more high-quality sites increases the domain authority of the target site. This makes it more valuable to internet users and therefore to the ranking algorithm.
Keyword complexity
Keyword difficulty is another metric that SEO tools use to assess how difficult it can be to rank a web page for a target keyword.
Metrics such as citation flow and trust flow are also important, as it's not just the quantity of backlinks that matters, but also their quality.
A website with a lower DA score can outrank a site with a higher DA score because it has better quality backlinks to the individual web page
Internal links
There are many SEO case studies that have proven that internal links increase the ranking of a web page in search results. And some SEO tests show that 3 internal links are on average equal to 1 external backlink.
Therefore, you should put internal links on the pages you want to get high positions in the search results using keyword-rich anchor text. In addition, you need to link from other relevant content on the site, not just randomly, because the annotation text surrounding the internal link can also be taken into account by Google's indexing algorithm.
So as you learned above, you don't always need a ton of backlinks to get a page to the top 10 positions on Google. To help you achieve better ranking results with fewer backlinks, here are some SEO best practices you can follow:
- Choose at least 3-5 keywords to optimize the page and choose terms with low keyword difficulty scores.
- Make on-page SEO as good as possible by placing keywords in the right places in the HTML so that Google can crawl them.
- Make sure that your content meets the search queries of users. Take a look at the sites ranking on Google for your main keyword phrase to see what type of content is being rewarded so you can create something similar.
- After publishing the article, create at least 5 contextual internal links to the page with keyword-rich anchor text.
- Link to the web page from your homepage if possible. The homepage usually has the highest internal PageRank value.
Once you've done everything you can to maximize the power of the SEO factors you can control on your site, then, and only then, should you aim to get more backlinks to an individual web page.
You may find that you need fewer backlinks than you imagined to rank for keywords after you have properly optimized your web page and on-page SEO signals.
